Artist Statement
“I make
paintings, not pictures”. (Brice Marden)
I have been
a painter for 30 years, off and on. Some years I’m more prolific than others,
but generally I work at Vermeer’s pace. I hope to get better at that someday.
My work use to be full of visual imagery, but since the late 1990’s, attempts
at narratives have been disappearing from my work. Now they are all but gone,
and only fragments for things that might be called objects exist in the work I
produce today.
There is
nothing so honest to me as the surface of a painting, one which does not deceive
itself, or pretend to be something more representational than what it actually
is. Just paint on a surface, just the presence of the material from which it is
constructed. Relying solely on the engagement (and persistence) of the viewer
to give it its essence and meaning. As a painter I try to make work that seems
real to me, that which shows reverence for and challenges the medium in which
it operates. One might say that is post-modernism, or neo-expressionism and
this might be true, but it might also still be relevant to think this way. To
consider the painted surface as nothing more than a puzzle, a maze of problems
encountered and resolved (not solved), one stroke at a time. The life of a
painting reflecting the life of the artist, without trying to do so.
Paul Melhado, New York 2014.